HCDE News

The UW Daily highlights recent work by an HCDE Directed Research Group led by lecturer and MS alumna Irini Spyridakis. The group has been working to design a website that can match UW dining hall leftovers with local nonprofits.

On February 13, 2018, HCDE Professor Beth Kolko will discuss how she scaled an idea to global impact with her company, Shift Labs, in a free public lecture at Seattle's Pacific Science Center. Listen to a podcast about her upcoming talk, here.

HCDE seniors Bonnie Tran and Leena Choi will present their project Menstrual Maze at the 2018 CHI conference, as part of the Student Design Competition. Menstrual Maze is an educational toy that engages parents, children, and educators in menstrual health and body literacy education. The project aims to address taboos around menstruation, by supporting dialogue on the topic between parents and children ages 4-9.

Current and former Human Centered Design & Engineering students connected at the department's 10th annual Network Night on January 22, 2018. Alumni representing companies such as Amazon, Deloitte Digital, Expedia, Intel, Microsoft, and Salesforce, shared career pathways and job application tips with with HCDE students.

In the current issue of Interactions Magazine, HCDE Assistant Professor Sean Munson discusses six common assumptions in the design of health tracking tools and provides insights about where designers and researchers should go from here.

This holiday season, HCDE Associate Professor Julie Kientz used a variety of online tools to organize a giving match between mothers working in academia. She asked academic mothers who are struggling to make ends meet what would help their families, and she matched them with academic mothers who have more than they need and who wanted to help. In all, over 240 gifts purchased for struggling families from women working in academia around the world.

In Autumn 2017, Human Centered Design & Engineering faculty members Brock Craft and Tyler Fox launched a new Directed Research Group to give students hands-on experience creating displays using living organisms.

HCDE Research Scientist Scott Miles recently returned from Mexico where he studied how local residents perceived and used their earthquake early warning system. Miles and his research team summarized their recommendations in an editorial for the December 2017 issue of Science Magazine.

Recent public debate around “fake news” has highlighted the growing challenge of online misinformation. This complex problem lies at the intersection of technology, human cognition and human behavior — and may make us unwitting accomplices to the spread of incorrect facts and misleading communication. Hear from Kate Starbird, whose research investigates online rumors to explore what conspiracy theories reveal about political propaganda.

A team of designers including HCDE Assistant Professor Daniela Rosner has received the 2017 Seattle Design Foundation grant for a proposed project addressing the question, "How can we better design for future dialogues across generations and demographics?"

In honor of Veterans Day, HCDE recognizes army veteran and HCDE faculty member: artist, technologist, and educator Dr. Tyler Fox. Fox’s background encompasses research and art in areas as broad as posthumanism and physical computing, and he attributes his career to the freedoms allowed by his service in the United States Army.

HCDE Assistant Professor Kate Starbird is embarking on a research project to study how people adapt to power outages and water shortages immediately following a natural disaster, to help policymakers, businesses and individuals better prepare for the future. The team will use earthquakes in Los Angeles as a case study.

NBC News interviews HCDE Professor Cecilia Aragon, the first Latina full professor in the College of Engineering, on her experience in the field and becoming a role model and mentor to younger Latinas.

HCDE mourns the loss of dedicated alumnus and affiliate faculty member Mike Sinkula. Mike graduated with his Master's in HCDE in 2014 and has been an instructor of HCDE's user-centered web design course ever since. He passed away in his home on Friday, September 27, 2017.

Shift Labs, the medical device company started by HCDE Professor Beth Kolko, has received the Global Health Innovator Award at the 2017 MedTech Conference for their work developing DripAssist, a low-cost, intuitively-designed portable infusion rate monitor.

HCDE Senior Lecturer Andrew Davidson is on a team of multidisciplinary University of Washington faculty members selected to receive a College of Engineering award to fund work on Arduino project-based learning in early engineering education.

HCDE is pleased to announce that Dr. Nadya Peek will join the department’s faculty as an assistant professor, beginning February 2018. Peek will bring a wealth of knowledge in machines and digital fabrication to HCDE’s interdisciplinary faculty.

HCDE's Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching (CELT) is hosting a two-day workshop on reflection in engineering education, bringing over 60 leaders in this emerging community together on the UW campus on September 14-15, 2017.

HCDE senior Caleb Park is currently taking a gap year from the UW to explore opportunities abroad. In August 2017, he was invited to give a presentation about HCDE to South Korea's International Forum for the Educational Revolution (IFER). Next, Park will travel to China to work at the Tsinghua University as an HCI research assistant.

The University of Washington's Whole U catches up with HCDE Associate Professor Julie Kientz for a Faculty Friday spotlight. By limiting technology's user burdens, Kientz crafts diverse applications to benefit population health as director of HCDE's Computing for Healthy Living and Learning Lab.